I've been looking at ways to do dome rotation and have found some interesting stuff on line but all the DYI jobs I've found are friction driven either by replacing a roller with a drive wheel or spring loading a motor and wheel assembly against the underside of the dome ring.
I originally imagined I'd friction drive the dome ring but I'm going to replace the wheels on mine with U grooves and install a track so I have options open.
Bert mentioned using belts in another thread and I've had a look at what you can buy in lenghts and I see timing belts and conidrive belts. The timing type belts are well known but the ones I found don't appear to be able to be joined in a loop.
The conidrive belts look to be visually similar to octopus suckers and the drive/idler wheels have matching dimples in them. They also have a joiner available but it appears to be made of alum so I'm not sure how you could use that in a flexible belt.
I picked up an old wiper motor today to fiddle with and it has all the mounts points etc already there. I'd guess you just add more of them to get more power. I'm not interested in getting toothed rings made up or anything else expensive, so are there any other options to consider?
Here's an old CN thread about this. Check out the "Building the dome and the beast" link in the 2nd last post. What an effort!
On a side note, an easy azimith sensor is a reed switch on the base ring with magnets around the dome ring.
